Image by Daves Portfolio via FlickrThe quick version of the article? Take a large PVC pipe, drill a bunch of holes around one end, bury that end in your garden with the pipe sticking straight up. Start dumping your kitchen scraps down the chute, and cover the top with something like a PVC cap, an overturned flower pot, whatever...just to stop flies from getting in there. Earthworms will go into the holes you drilled, will eat all the scraps, and will tunnel back out, leaving their castings as they go.Sure, I have a compost tumbler, which is nice, clean, tidy, up off the ground, tucked in behind the house, encased in metal, and ...hm, wait, the problem with this is it's just too darn sterile. Does it work? Well, yeah, the stuff I throw in there and tumble by cranking the handle breaks down in time, but it's not quite the same "breaking down" as if it were in contact with the ground where worms, bugs and micro-organisms can get into it and really process it. Instead it's more of a "rot" kinda thing - an unfinished compost that you then tuck into the garden and let the critters finish off.
Image by goosmurf via FlickrAnd to be honest, I've actually maxed out both sides (it's a dual tumbler) - where you're waiting for one side to finish decomposing, and the other side is getting where there's too much stuff added to it. At the point where there's too much stuff in there, the cranking of the mechanism is spinning stuff in place, but there's not much tumbling going on to help break up the stuff.Sooooo...what if I add a worm tube or two to each of my raised beds? That'll be another place to drop off kitchen scraps and spare leaf matter from garden plants, AND it'll lure more earthworms into my raised beds, and in turn they'll help aerate the soil while leaving their worm castings behind.
Oh yeah, sweet, I'm so totally doing this!
Let's just hope I don't forget!
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